Biographies and memoirs

CHANG, Jung (China/England) *

Wild swans: three daughters of China [929.2 Chang, BIOG]

HarperCollins, 1991/HarperPerennial, 2004

Spoken word cassette/CD

Through the story of three generations of women - grandmother, mother and daughter - Wild Swans tells nothing less than the whole tumultuous history of China's tragic twentieth century, from sword-bearing warlords to Chairman Mao, from the Manchu Empire to the Cultural Revolution.

XU, Meihong (China/America) *

Daughter of China: the true story of forbidden love in modern China [920 Xu BIOG]

Headline, 1999

This is the story of Meihong Xu, a woman trained as an elite member of the Chinese Army, who fell in love with a visiting American professor on whom she had been told to spy. Interspersed with flashbacks to Meihong' s childhood, this is a tale of humanity triumphing over brutality.

YEN MAH, Adeline (China/America) [910.951, HIS]

Chinese Cinderella: the secret story of an unwanted daughter

[Children's book - People]

Puffin, 1999

The story of Chinese Cinderella, a young girl who, after being thrown out of her home, has no choice but to go out and seek her own destiny. Soon she meets up with a group of children, all orphaned but each from a different background, who live with an old lady called Grandma Wu. Based on a true-life incident during World War II. Chinese Cinderella and the others bravely rescue a group of American pilots whose plane crashed after a bombing raid on Japan.

Falling leaves return to their roots: the true story of an unwanted Chinese daughter [920 Yen Mah, BIOG]

Michael Joseph, 1997/Penguin, 1997

This is a Chinese woman' s story of how she suffered appalling emotional deprivation and rejection by her family as a child growing up in China and Hong Kong in the 40s and 50s, and of its consequences in her adult life. How she rose above her background to make a happy marriage and become an extremely successful doctor and businesswoman in the USA. It' s also a story about Hong Kong: of middle-class life at the time of the European concessions and thereafter. The text shows how east connects with west and offers an insight into a particular kind of Chinese life.

YING, Hong (China/England) *

Daughter of the river: autobiography [920 Ying, BIOG]

Bloomsbury, 1998

The autobiography of a young girl growing up in Mao' s China. Hong Ying grew up in a slum on the banks of the Yangtze, the youngest of the six children. Gradually, Hong Ying began to try and solve some of the mysteries, which had seemed to surround her early life. A stalker who had followed her since she was a child, a VD record in her father' s file, and a persistent feeling that there was something strange about her birth. Among her discoveries, Hong Ying learnt that her mother was once married to a Triadman who had died in a labour camp as a counter-revolutionary, while her father, now a blind sailor, had several times barely escaped with his life during the civil war.